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Soraya Sarif was driving to her bank job after school when her life changed in a split second of inattention.

She wasn’t on a cellphone, putting on makeup, speeding or driving drunk. She can’t really explain what happened that afternoon 13 years ago, except that through the glare she saw the car in front of her proceed through the light.

So Sarif, 18 at the time, followed behind, assuming it was green. She was horribly wrong.

The shattering crash, the crumpled metal, the splintered glass, the ambulance, the stretcher, the police officer who came to the hospital to tell her the other driver had been killed — it’s all a cacophony of memory and confusion.

“You may be responsible for the loss of somebody else’s life — it knocks the wind right out of you,” she recalls. “It was quite an emotional ordeal.”

Sarif is now 31, an employee engagement consultant doing her MBA in Dubai. When we tracked her down to see if she’d talk about her role in the collision that killed Tyron Kan, she welcomed the opportunity to use her painful experience as a cautionary tale.

“Does it even stay with her or has she moved on?” Kan’s daughter had wondered.

She may not like the answer. Sarif is certainly not paralyzed by guilt, at least not anymore.

“Initially I did feel guilty,” she admits. “You feel responsible to a certain degree but you do have to face the fact that it was an accident and it wasn’t intentional. It took some time to accept that.”

She recalls her fear of being charged criminally for a “complete and innocent mistake” and her immense relief when a York Regional Police officer reassured her it was just a terrible accident.

“It gave me an extra chance to make sure I improved the way I was doing things,” she says.

“Uncomfortable” legal proceedings followed to deal with her traffic offence of running a red light and the civil suit launched by Kan’s family. She remembers looking at them from afar, trying to empathize with their grief.

“If she had reached out, I would have forgiven her,” Katherine Kan had said.

Sarif thought about it. But injured and overwhelmed, she says that by the time she felt able to contact them, she worried the time had passed and it would open old wounds. Instead, Sarif, a Shia Ismaili Muslim, held a 40-day prayer session for Kan.

“Praying for him gave me a bit of solace. It helped the healing process for me,” she says.

For a long time, it was difficult to get back behind the wheel without being haunted by traumatic flashbacks. That eventually passed, but her changed attitude toward driving has not.

“I still think about it today. Every time I’m in my car, I’m very careful,” she explains. “I’ve made a pledge to myself to avoid all distractions. I disable all my data when I’m on the road. An accident can happen in a fraction of a second. It’s just about being as careful as you possibly can.”

In her motivational speaking, Sarif talks about being consciously in the moment.

“We’re under constant pressure to keep up and fit a lot more into our day,” she explains. “People only think about being mindful when sitting in a yoga class and not going about their daily business.”

Unless we’re more alert, she warns, dangerous lapses in driver attention are bound to increase.

She was recently on the receiving end of that prediction. Her car was hit from behind by an inattentive young driver in Dubai, leaving her with back injuries that postponed her trip home.

In her case, Sarif believes she was forever changed by what happened and no tougher penalty could have done more.

“I already understood the seriousness of the situation long before I was fined,” she writes in a follow-up e-mail. “That seriousness was imposed by my conscience, not by a monetary amount.”

Instead, she feels mediation and dialogue are more important. So all these years later, what would she say now to Kan’s daughter?

“I would really love to tell her that it’s made me a better person. It was life-changing for me, both positive and negative,” she says. “I would like to apologize and wish them a better and happier future.”

Kan is now contemplating contact with the driver she blames for her father’s death.

“Part of me thinks it may help me deal with this. But I’m scared as well,” she confesses. “The time I needed to hear from her is already gone.”

Driver in killer crash forever changed but not ruled by guilt

Soraya Sarif was driving to her bank job after school when her life changed in a split second of inattention.

She wasn’t on a cellphone, putting on makeup, speeding or driving drunk. She can’t really explain what happened that afternoon 13 years ago, except that through the glare she saw the car in front of her proceed through the light.

So Sarif, 18 at the time, followed behind, assuming it was green. She was horribly wrong.

The shattering crash, the crumpled metal, the splintered glass, the ambulance, the stretcher, the police officer who came to the hospital to tell her the other driver had been killed — it’s all a cacophony of memory and confusion.